Author: Amy Diaz

Amy Diaz is the executive editor and writes about movies and compiles the Kiddie Pool column. Reach her at [email protected].

Creed III (PG-13)

Creed III (PG-13)

Adonis Creed fights childhood trauma in Creed III, a thoroughly engaging entry in the Creed offshoot of the Rockyverse.

After finally beating Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew), his opponent from the first movie, Adonis “Donnie” Creed (Michael B. Jordan) retires from boxing and lives a happily family-centered life in Los Angeles. He spends time at his gym building up the next generation of boxers and takes care of his elementary-school-age daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent), including dressing up as a dragon or something for a tea party while wife Bianca (Tessa Thompson) is working on the music she writes and produces. He seems content — until childhood friend Damian “Dame” Anderson (Jonathan Majors) comes to visit him. Dame has been in prison for nearly two decades but before that he and Donnie were as tight as brothers when they lived in a foster care group home together. They still hung out after Apollo Creed’s widow, Mary-Anne (Phylicia Rashad), adopted Donnie, though apparently she didn’t think much of the friendship since we see a young Donnie (Thaddeus J. Mixson) sneaking out to hang out with young Dame (Spence Moore II), who at the time is a promising young boxer.

In the present, Dame’s presence pushes Donnie back into the headspace of his younger self, remembering the physical abuse he suffered at the group home and the incident that led to Dame’s incarceration. When Dame, who is older than Donnie, tells him he wants to get back to boxing, Donnie knows it’s a bad idea but he reluctantly helps his friend get a fight, out of guilt and obligation. As everyone around Donnie realizes faster than Donnie does, Dame isn’t just trying to recapture past glory; he has some serious grudges to work out.

The beats of this movie are all pretty much what you expect them to be. And there aren’t a lot of surprises in the arcs of the characters either. But everybody here — Jordan, Thompson, the suddenly everywhere Majors — is so compelling, so engaging to watch even when they’re working with some fairly familiar material, that I was pulled in even if this movie doesn’t have the spark of the first Creed. (And while this movie is plenty warm-hearted, I missed the squishy bear hug that Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky brought to these movies.) Nevertheless, I was in and I enjoyed this movie that is a smarter, well-finessed version of the boxing movie standard. B

Rated PG-13 for intense sports action, violence and some strong language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Michael B. Jordan with a screenplay by Keenan Coogler & Zach Baylin, Creed III is an hour and 56 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures.

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (R)

Jason Statham does a goofy riff on James Bond-ish spy adventure with the Guy Ritchie-directed and co-written Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, a movie that really feels like someone’s hoping to make it a part 1.

And I feel like, were this on Netflix and available for watching while you sipped your cocktail of choice and dozed on the sofa some Friday night after a long week, it would be a perfect part 1 for a perfectly moderately entertaining series.

Orson Fortune (Statham), a contract government spying-and-stuff type, is charged by his handler Nathan (Cary Elwes), who has been charged by British government official Knighton (Eddie Marsan, doing quality “exasperated”), to find a thing. What thing? It’s called “The Handle” and nobody knows what it is or what it does but it was stolen from a lab, it’s being sold by arms dealer Greg Simmonds (a delightfully sleazy Hugh Grant) and all the wrong sorts of people want it. So Nathan and his team of Orson, Sarah (Aubrey Plaza) and JJ (Bugzy Malone) have to get it back before any of the bad people get it. Unfortunately, someone has clearly tasked a competing team led by Mike (Peter Ferdinando) to do the same, so the two teams — who have professional rivalries with each other — are constantly getting tangled in each other’s operations.

Eventually, the Nathan-Orson team lands on a means of getting close to Greg Simmonds that involves enlisting the help of/blackmailing into service Greg’s favorite actor, Danny Francesco (Josh Hartnett). The gang jumps around Europe, to Los Angeles and eventually to Turkey, pulling off assorted capers along the way to try to track down The Handle, which is such a McGuffin that I was a little disappointed when we actually learned what it is.

There are several more characters — a house full of shady types, a pair of sketchy tech types, an assortment of henchmen and women — I haven’t mentioned yet, the tonnage of which also gives the movie a feel of a two-episode pilot packed full of the characters we’ll bump into throughout the season. It also means that no one character, not the actor-y Danny or hacker Sarah or tough guy Orson (who has this whole character thing about liking fancy wine that just never really goes anywhere), gets time to really develop. Operation Fortune stuffs in a whole lot of a whole lot — fights, chases, Aubrey Plaza wackiness that feels a bit like her Parks and Recreation character doing a computer hacker a la Janet Snakehole — into its not-quite two-hour run time and yet it feels more like it’s stocking up on plot business than telling a complex story. I often felt like somehow in all this too much, there was not enough — not enough choreographed-action wows or sparky intra-character chemistry or general funness. Some of the action even hit that spot of movie white noise, where I felt myself having to work extra hard to stay awake — not a fatal flaw for a movie you watch on your couch where you can rewind but not ideal for a movie you put on hard pants to see. B-

Rated R for language and violence, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Guy Ritchie with a screenplay by Guy Ritchie and Ivan Atkinson & Marn Davies, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is an hour and 54 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Lionsgate.

Featured photo: Creed 3.

At the Sofaplex 23/03/02

Babylon (R)

Margot Robie, Brad Pitt.

Writer-director Damien Chazelle gives you three hours and nine minutes of 1920s and 1930s Hollywood, as the business adapted to sound and the movie industry machine chewed through the people involved. Here, we focus on Nellie LaRoy (Robie), a young woman who cons her way into a Hollywood party from which she lucks her way into a movie and briefly becomes a silent star sensation; Manny Torres (Diego Calva), who is working the party as a kind of general fix-it guy (help this elephant get up the hill to the house, help these goons dispose of an overdosing starlet); Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), an established star who takes on Manny as his assistant; Sideny Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a trumpet player who finds stardom and a financial windfall in front of the camera but doesn’t get any relief from the persistent racism he deals with as a Black artist, and to a lesser extent Elinor St. Jean (Jean Smart), a gossip columnist who even in the 1920s knows that movie fame is fleeting.

A lot of names — Olivia Wilde, Max Minghella, Jeff Garlin, Spike Jonze, Flea — show up for cameos and as do actors playing historical types (Irving Thalberg, William Randolph Hearst). It’s, uhm, cute, in the same way I found the Citizen Kane cosplay of Mank cute and amusing in a “photo book about 1930s Oscars” kind of way. Even better are process-y scenes that demonstrate, with some equally cute exaggeration, how these early movies were made — and some of the ways that pre-code films were a lot racier than the movies that were on screens a decade later. An extended sequence of Nellie and director Ruth Adler (Olivia Hamilton) trying to film a scene of a talkie while the cast and crew swelter in the heat (air conditioning would be too loud) and have to deal with the sensitivities of the microphones is particularly fun. There is also a nice bit of storytelling in who made it through the transition — not Nellie and her Harley Quinn accent, for example.

But.

But this movie is so much elaborate scene-setting, so much “The Magic of the Movies!” and so much Hollywood doing a guided tour up its own rear that it is, at times, completely intolerable. And, from Singin’ in the Rain (which is a touchstone for this movie) to the most recent Downton Abbey movie, I feel like I’ve seen a lot of this stuff before. And it’s more than three hours. Three. Hours.

Babylon is nominated for Oscars in categories for costume design, original score and production design and while I can understand those nominations, I don’t think it would be my pick in any of those categories. C+ (but a strong B for the “Nellie shoots in sound” scene.) Available for purchase and on Paramount+.

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (R)

Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliana.

Early in Bardo, co-written and directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, we watch as Lucia (Siciliana) delivers her and husband Silverio’s (Giménez Cacho) son, Mateo. Moments after his birth, doctors tell her Mateo says he doesn’t want to be out in a world as messed up as this and so they put him back, er, in. This pretty well sets the scene for the movie we’re watching, where Silverio jumps around in time and where the truth of a situation is often rendered lyrically more than realistically. Silverio, a journalist turned filmmaker, started his career in Mexico, where he and his family are from, but moved to Los Angeles with his wife and kids when they were young. He wrestles with the U.S./Mexico of it all — from the Mexican American War to the present relationship between the countries and what it means for the people who move between the two. He also has a conversation about Mexican-ness with Cortés and occasionally finds himself in the desert with migrants. He also wanders through his own life, suddenly child-sized when he talks to his father, and talking with his children Lorenzo (Iker Solano) and Camila (Ximena Lamadrid) while thoughts of Mateo are never far from his mind.

It can all read as sort of self-indulgent at times — a criticism the movie itself makes of itself in its foldy self-referential way — but the movie is so good-humored and genuine about what it’s doing and how it knows you know it knows what it’s doing that I was, you know, never mad at it. It’s weird and mournful but also joyful — and, here’s where the Oscar nomination comes in, absolutely visually stunning. A nominee in the cinematography category, Bardo makes good use of its frequently very lovely settings but also of the dreamlike way it’s shot and the way scenes morph into other scenes in the way your dream might take you from a memory to a fear to a recent conversation. I see how this movie could annoy someone — its lead is, after all, a Great Man Looking at His Life — and maybe I just got lucky and saw this movie at the moment I was most open to this kind of twisty, floaty ride but: A Available on Netflix.

Empire of Light (R)

Olivia Colman, Michael Ward.

Olivia Colman can act the heck out of anything, is my main takeaway from Empire of Light, a sssslooooow movie (that is actually only an hour and 55 minutes) about a woman and her unlikely relationship in 1980s Thatcher U.K.

Hilary (Colman) works at the Empire, a movie theater, in a town on the English coast that instantly made me think of the Morrissey song. Though we don’t learn the full details for a while, we know that she has struggled with mental health issues and that the medication she is now taking has left her feeling flat. It’s not that she’s unhappy — taking dance lessons, making small talk with coworkers, engaging in a deeply unsexy affair with the theater’s manager (played by Colin Firth) — but there just isn’t a spark in her. And then arrives Stephen (Ward), a young man who didn’t get into university and whose Jamaican heritage makes life difficult in a time when racism and nationalism seems to be on the rise in England. Stephen and Hilary take an immediate shine to each other despite the age disparity. Their friendly coworker-ship soon turns into something more, but both of them are struggling with issues greater than a sunny romance.

Empire of Light is Oscar nominated for Cinematography and I fully get why — it’s a beautiful-looking film, from the fading glory of the Empire, a movie palace that once had multiple floors and a rooftop cafe, to the lights and grays and shadows of the city. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Colman was, like, 8 or 9 on the list of nominated actresses. Elements of this movie are very compelling. But the movie as a whole needed a jolt of energy. B

Available on HBO Max or for rent or purchase.

To Leslie (R)

Andrea Riseborough, Marc Maron.

Leslie (Riseborough, nominated for actress in a leading role*) goes to see her 19-or-20-year-old son James (Owen Teague) after being evicted from the motel where she had been living. He quickly kicks her out after she refuses to stay sober and steals money from his roommate, sending her back to their hometown, where his grandmother and her boyfriend (the parents of his unmentioned father, I think) put her up. Nancy (Allison Janney) and Dutch (Stephen Root) are minorly supportive but also harbor deep grudges toward Leslie and she’s soon kicked out of their house too. She floats around her hometown, eventually getting caught hanging out near a motel run by Sweeney (Maron) and Royal (Andre Royo). Sweeney takes pity on Leslie and offers her a job cleaning the motel along with a room to stay in, which begins a fraught and shaky friendship.

Riseborough gives an interesting and highly watchable performance as a woman who can’t quite get out her own way — she won more than $100,000 in a lottery years ago but squandered it partying — and is battling a serious alcohol addiction. Is it a strong enough performance to carry the weight of the * for which this small movie is known? The asterisk is the story surrounding Riseborough’s Oscar nomination, the campaign for which was a grassroots affair by famous fans and, according to a New York Times explainer from Feb. 8, her manager. The Academy got involved in the uproar after nominations were announced and, whatever rules may have been bent, her nomination stands. It will probably always bear the stain of being the nomination that denied Viola Davis for The Woman King or Danielle Deadwyler for Till an Oscar nod. And while both of those are better performances than Riseborough’s work here, they are also better than nominee Ana de Armas in the icksome Blonde, so really it’s not all Riseborough’s fault.

On its own merits, To Leslie is a solid movie worth a watch. B+ Available for rent or purchase.

Cocaine Bear (R)

A bear does cocaine in Cocaine Bear, a movie that is 100 percent exactly what you think it’s going to be.

This movie opens with title cards giving us facts about black bears citing Wikipedia as its source, which feels tonally perfect. Like, here’s some information but we didn’t work super hard to get it and we don’t stand by its accuracy. (But, speaking of Wikipedia, a link on this movie’s Wikipedia page will take you to the tale of the “real life” Cocaine Bear, who has apparently been stuffed and is now on display at something called the “Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall” and also the bear’s nickname is sometimes “Pablo Eskobear” and, well, I definitely recommend the “Cocaine Bear” Wikipedia page.) This movie is directed by Elizabeth Banks and if you can picture her seriously reading you facts about bears, that gives you a sense of where this movie is, vibe-wise, even though she herself doesn’t appear in the movie.

It’s the “this is your brain on drugs” 1980s and a drug smuggler dumps duffel bags filled with cocaine out of an airplane and into a Georgia forest before jumping himself. Well, before preparing to jump himself. Before he can actually jump, he bonks his head, falls out of the plane and ends up splatting in someone’s yard. But the gang expecting the cocaine — led by Syd (Ray Liotta, in his final role, according to IMDb) — knows that most of it is still out there and needs to go collect it so as not to incur the wrath of the cartel wholesaling it to them. Syd sends his son, Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), who is still grieving the loss of his wife and is generally disinterested in his dad’s whole drug-dealing thing, and Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), a friend to Eddie but also no-nonsense in his approach to the cocaine retrieval, to find the missing drugs.

Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), nominally a detective but primarily an Isiah Whitlock character, suspects that Syd’s gang might be looking for the cocaine and goes on the hunt for it in hopes of nabbing them.

Before those opposing forces can get to the drugs, though, a trio of crime-minded dummies — whose IMDb names are “Kid (Stache)” (Aaron Holliday), “Vest” (J. B. Moore) and “Ponytail” (Leo Hanna) — find one of the duffels and hides it in the forest, hoping to go back for it later.

But before any of these guys start their cocaine search, a large female black bear finds some of the cocaine, consumes it and decides she loves cocaine. She is single-minded on getting more cocaine — possibly grunting something like “yum yum” when she’s near it? maybe that was my imagination. And while not usually portrayed this way, cocaine seems to give her the munchies, specifically for humans, the more clueless the better.

This is bad news not just for the cops and criminals on the search for the drugs but also for anybody who happens to be in the woods, like for example single mother Sari (Keri Russell), searching for her tween-ish-aged daughter Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and Dee Dee’s buddy Henry (Christian Convery), who have cut school to go to the forest in search of a waterfall. And forest ranger Liz (Margo Martindale), who is far more concerned with seducing wildlife expert Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson).

Everybody, every Margo Martindale and Keri Russell and Ray Liotta body, seems to be having a total blast here — and why not. The movie is called Cocaine Bear and the coked up bear quickly overtakes all other storylines and character elements as being the key issue of the movie. This is not a horror movie, this isn’t even a thriller really, it’s just a bear, on cocaine, chasing O’Shea Jackson Jr., who like his dad (Ice Cube) is solid at being the straight man in a wacky situation. What’s not to enjoy? The movie — like this year’s Plane or last year’s Beast — is totally and completely up front about what it is going to deliver to you and then it delivers exactly that. What are this movie’s themes? Bear on cocaine. What is this movie’s central argument? That a bear on cocaine will want more cocaine. What does this movie make you feel? That you are watching a bear on cocaine — or, you know, a good-enough rendering of a bear. This movie does have some gore, which feels more for the comic “ew” of it all than to really induce fear. There is a “glued on mustache” sensibility that pervades this movie, which perhaps keeps it from reaching some, I don’t know, higher height of intoxicated bear cinema but also keeps things humming along at a nicely unserious, deliberately shabby level. Which is all to say, if Cocaine Bear seems both really stupid and like something you, with your daily stresses and worries, might need in your life, you are absolutely correct. B

Rated R for bloody violence and gore, drug content and language throughout, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Elizabeth Banks and written by Jimmy Warden, Cocaine Bear is an hour and 35 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: Cocaine Bear.

At the Sofaplex 23/02/23

Aftersun (R)

Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio.

Dad Calum (Mescal, nominated for actor in a leading role) and tween-ish daughter Sophie (Corio) vacation while, a few decades in the future, adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), now married with a child, remembers the visit in this bittersweet drama. Primarily, Aftersun just gives us father and daughter hanging out in a sunny, slightly shabby resort. He appears to not be her primary parent, so there is some catching up and attempting to reconnect. Sophie seems to be finding her way into this world where she enjoys being goofy with her dad and playing video games with a kid her own age but also seems nervously entranced by the older kids she plays pool with. Corio excellently captures kid confidence with teen uncertainty at the fringes and makes Sophie into a recognizable 11-year-old. We see the vacation mostly from her perspective. It’s only gradually that we see that Calum is having some kind of slow-motion breakdown while trying to keep up the facade of a happy visit. Aftersun, directed and written by Charlotte Wells, has great performances all around and is an enjoyable movie even if its sweetness is delivered with a degree of sadness. A Available for rent or purchase.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (PG-13)

Eternally youthful Paul Rudd returns for an adventure in the tinyverse in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

Scott Lang/Ant-Man (Rudd) has a pretty good post-Thanos life. He’s written a book, he’s publicly beloved and his girlfriend Hope Van Dyne/the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) is using science to make the world a better place. But then he gets a call from the police department where his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) is being held after getting arrested at a protest where she may have shrunk a police car (Hope slipped her an Ant-Man-like suit). When Scott brings her home to the Pym/Van Dyne house, he learns Cassie has been working with Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope on tech to map the quantum realm. Everyone’s proud of young Cassie’s invention but Hank’s wife/Hope’s mom Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) gets panicked when she realizes the device sends a signal into the quantum realm. She tries to shut it off but the device malfunctions and sucks them all in — or down, I guess, as the quantum realm is the submicroscopic world below or inside or whatever our world.

Janet, you’ll remember, was once stuck in the quantum realm for decades and when the gang — separated into two groups: the Pym/Van Dyne family and Scott and Cassie — arrives they realize she knows more than she’s ever explained about this world. For one, it’s populated by an assortment of beings, some more humanoid than others. And one of those beings is apparently the big noise of the quantum realm with some kind of old score to settle with Janet.

Eventually we meet this guy and he is Kang (Jonathan Majors), a name to remember for Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you watched Loki and didn’t give up after one episode like I did, apparently he is familiar (and also there’s some Loki content in the post-credits, according to the internet; I only stayed for one mid-credits scene, which was wearying). He is the villain — I guess? Mostly, he just feels like the start to a Whole Thing.

This movie is primarily made of goofiness, some of which I enjoyed (a cute if not well-used cameo, some business with Hank Pym’s ants) and some of which I just found to be tiresome. Everything to do with the fraying of the multiverse or whatever, the half-baked “secrets Janet never divulged” stuff, and Kang’s whole deal all just feel like a drag on whatever fun the movie could have had.

This movie feels so invested in being the first chapter of a new thing that it seems like it forgot to put together a compelling stand-alone story. And while I have affection for both Paul Rudd and Scott Lang, that affection isn’t enough for the movie to skate by with so few redeeming elements of its own. C

Rated PG-13 because that is the most profitable rating — I mean, for violence/action and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Peyton Reed with a screenplay by Jeff Loveness, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is two hours and five minutes long and distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios.

Featured photo: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Magic Mike’s Last Dance (R)

Channing Tatum’s Mike takes his skills to London in Magic Mike’s Last Dance, a movie about abs.

Sure, there’s other stuff: A romance between Tatum’s character and Salma Hayek Pinault’s character that never has quite as much charm and chemistry as their little pre-movie “thank you for watching this movie” message. A plot that feels like somebody watched part of an early Ted Lasso episode and said how about we do a little of that, sorta. A show within a show, to give us the big dance finale we bought our tickets to go see. Some impressive biceps, some (clothed) butts. But, like, if I had to sum it all up: abs, this movie is about really chiseled abs.

Narration — delivered by Zadie (Jemelia George), the bored teenage daughter of Maxandra (Hayek Pinault) — explains that Mike Lane (Tatum) lost his furniture business in the pandemic, which is why he is bartending at a fancy party in Miami. He runs into Kim (Caitlin Gerard), a woman whose bachelorette party he danced at back in the 2012 original Magic Mike movie. Now a lawyer for Maxandra, the woman throwing the fancy party Mike is working, Kim tells the divorcing and unhappy Maxandra about Mike’s past occupation. Max calls him into her house after the party and offers him $6,000 for a dance. He delivers and then some, which is how they end up in bed with Max offering to take him to London. She has a job for him — not that — that will require him for a month, after which she will pay him $60,000. He agrees, which is how he finds himself at a historic theater which has been presenting a fusty play.

Max got control of the theater as part of her divorce — mostly out of spite because her ex-mother-in-law loves it — and, after being danced on by Mike, decides that what she most wants is to bring the passion of that experience to the London stage. She asks Mike, with his male entertainer background, to direct this new production. She also declares that there will be no more romance between them; he declares that he will not dance in this production. Guess what happens!

The day I saw this movie, I consumed a fair amount of Magic Mike content. I finally saw 2015’s Magic Mike XXL and I listened to the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast episode about that movie (featuring hosts Joe Reid and Chris V. Feil with their Oscar-nominated buddy Pamela Ribon as guest). That episode was a delight, as was XXL — all goofy buddy energy and lots of dudes gyrating while trying to make flustered ladies feel sexy. It’s fun! It’s, as the podcast observed, all fun, with none of the more serious elements of the original movie.

I bring all this up because if that’s where you’re coming from, the “Woo-hoo! Pony!” vibe of XXL, Last Dance isn’t going to quite live up to that abs-tastic joyfulness, with Jada Pinkett Smith calling the female audience queens and Joe Manganiello being a loveable goof. The remaining Kings of Tampa are mostly absent in this third outing. Instead, we get a lot of relationship-building between Mike and Max, most of which happens with Mike talking and not dancing. There is also stuff about Max’s struggles to be a mother to Zadie and her difficult divorce — and, sorry to Hayek Pinault, but I didn’t care about any of that. Zadie, sassy teen, can be a fun balance to the sometimes kooky dreams of Max, and she and Max’s butler (Ayub Khan-Din) have a nice brothers-in-arms sort of friendship, but generally all of that stuff felt a bit like spinning our wheels waiting for dancing, which this movie felt rather light on. There is a cute sequence about halfway through that blends dance and caper, a director Steven Soderbergh specialty, and I wish the movie had done more of that, had more of that energy, lightness and general glee.

Overall, Magic Mike’s Last Dance is an OK amount of fun, a B maybe or a B- when compared to the top-notch “ladies make some noise” delight of Magic Mike XXL, which is a solid B+. And, for the record, This Had Oscar Buzz in general, and this episode in particular, are always an A+.

Rated R for sexual material and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Steven Soderbergh with a screenplay by Reid Carolin, Magic Mike’s Last Dance is an hour and 52 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Warner Bros.

Want more Magic Mike? The original movie is currently streaming on HBO Max, if we’re still calling it that, and is available for rent or purchase. Magic Mike XXL is also streaming on HBO Max and Hulu (where it’s labeled TBS on Demand) and is available for rent or purchase.

This Had Oscar Buzz is available where ever you get your podcasts and is an absolute must for movie nerds, especially during Oscar season.

Pamela Ribon, a one-time Television Without Pity writer, writer on a bunch of TV and movie stuff including Ralph Breaks the Internet and a co-host of the Listen to Sassy podcast (also excellent), is nominated for an Oscar in the animated shorts category for the movie whose title got a little moment when Riz Ahmed read it — starts with My Year of and if you Google it you can probably still find it to watch via Vimeo. Watch it, it’s great! (Decidedly not for kids but great!)

Featured photo: Magic Mike’s Last Dance.

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